Shelburne Museum--Shelburne, Vermont. If you get a chance, go here. It is incredible and the collections are breathtaking

The Arnold Circus Parade has nearly 4,000 figures. It was made between 1925-55 and forms a parade over 500 feet long. The one-inch-to-one-foot scale figures include a myriad of clowns, acrobats, animals, and circus wagons that evoke the heyday of the circus era.
Lets compare this "old" miniature folk art with the photo below of the "new" Circus Globus offering of the "realistic" fiberglass tiger head, silk vines wrapped around the props, and cardboard airbrushed "scenery, and see if we can decide where the term "kvitchy" came from.
While we are at it let's knock Cirque Solei one more time, because after all they were the ones who ruined the circus by changing it and becoming wildly successful. Then let's all copy/pattern their format and costuming, but we will do it in a cheezy/spastic style so that we don't copy and we can be the innovators. It is an alarming trend in the formally top of their game European Circus. You wouldn't know it by listening to reports of "business is booming", but it looks very much like a last ditch effort. As the 3 ring down to 1 format looks in America. If all the talent hadn't left there might not be such a dependence on illusion and fake.